Editorial: ‘Solutions’ spell danger

Thursday, June 16, 2005 | 9:15 a.m.

What to do with lethal nuclear waste is a question whose answer continues to elude and divide members of Congress. The House last month inserted a provision in a spending bill that would commit $10 million for the Energy Department to start a temporary, aboveground storage program by 2006. The provision was the idea of Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Appropriations energy subcommittee. It would settle the waste on federal sites in Idaho, Washington and perhaps in other states.

Hobson argued that the proposed permanent solution -- burial at Southern Nevada's Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas -- is so mired in legal and scientific obstacles that temporary sites are needed. He is wrong to believe that temporary storage is an interim solution, for some of the same reasons that permanent burial at Yucca is wrong. Transporting the waste to the sites, for example, would endanger every community along the routes. The risk of an accident is a risk the nation cannot afford to take.

Fortunately, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee dropped Hobson's provision from the larger spending bill. The action leaves the House and Senate divided on what to do with the waste that is accumulating at nuclear power plants. In our view, underground, permanent storage at Yucca Mountain is an invitation to catastrophe, as is aboveground, temporary storage at federal sites.

Until an intelligent solution for disposal is found, we say leave the waste at the power plants, where it has been safely stored for decades.